SI: Vocal Minority: Sierra Club member protests power plant construction

[Tweed]

http://www.southernillinoisan.com/articles/2005/03/09/local/100475.txt

"NASHVILLE - Wearing a red heart-shaped sandwich board and carrying two similarly shaped balloons, Jack Norman walked the streets of downtown Nashville Tuesday morning, hoping local residents would take his message to heart: Say yes to clean air and no to a proposed $2 billion clean coal power plant.

Norman stopped in businesses, trying to spread his word that the Prairie State Energy Campus, the 1,500-megawatt power plant and adjacent underground coal mine proposed for the rural county near Marissa, would not just bring promised prosperity in the form of 450 permanent jobs, as well as 2,500 construction jobs, but would also bring a host of environmental and public health concerns.

"I am trying to encourage the citizens of Washington County and its county board to think further about whether the Prairie State Energy Campus, proposed by St. Louis-based Peabody Energy Company, is good for the county and the region," said Norman, who lives in nearby Monroe County.

Norman said he has concerns about the power plant's ability to make emission levels for sulfur dioxide, mercury and other materials "acceptable from an environmental and health standpoint." He is also worried about the impact the plant and coal mine might have on local water supplies and quality, as well as quality-of-life issues like increased traffic and noise."

Jobs vs. quality of life, a constant debate. That old guy is one hardcore mofo.

[Radical Activist]

1. Illinois environmentalists are not being effective about this issue

Breakfast comes before the environment. People want a job so they can put food on the table before they worry about clean air. People in this regions still remember how the clean air act destroyed their entire coal-based economy. They should have started talking a few years ago about building ethanol plants in Southern Illinois, so that the burden of opposing new jobs would be on those who are against clean air.

Talking about clean air is too abstract anyway. They need to ask people how many more of their children and neighbors children they want to grow up with asthma and other diseases due to the power plant. They need to ask people whose jobs depend on tourism if they're looking forward to the power plant making the fish inedible due to high mercury levels. For too long the message on the environmental end has been driven by groups based in Chicago (like PIRG) that don't know how to make an effective appeal in Southern Illinois.